Inspiration
Rising wave, sudden rush,
Collapse, a bubbling sheet
Melts in the soft sand.

Science inclines to undermine the delicate and vulnerable human quality of wonder.  This is not a matter of science explaining too much but rather one of image and purpose, and therein lies the question of whether the diminution of wonder is simply the result of the coarse onslaught of axiomatic reductionism inherent in science, or is it a more recent cloak of vanity born of the gut
fear of unknowing.  The answer determines whether one challenges the glorious entertainment with melodious words and telling wit, alone or with touches of theology.   
                                       (After Science, The Glorious Entertainment by Jacques Barzun)

The pantheon of Greek gods are less ugly than a Christianity subverted to phenomenology.
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Tavern Talk
Ide:   There are three kinds of people in the world,   
the God fearing and those who are not God fearing.
Emp: (pause, absently)  You said three.
Ide:   You were listening then.
Emp: Those who know him not, I suppose; and that’s most of us, isn’t it?
Ide:    I suppose.  God knowers are few, even if God believers are many.

   
Entanglements
While God is the focus of all I believe,
Molecular structures are all I see.

Looming images of God,
Dim, remote, fearful,
Towering in a desolate desert, 
A perilous gamble to know:
Few surrender, many suffer –Dreadful!

For quite some time, my deepest awareness has been that I am a pilgrim in an alien land.
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Tavern Talk
Emp: I feel good, connected, one with the world, the universe.  I’m at home.
Ide:   But your world is flat, your contentment is blind to the deep of existence.
Emp: Whatever.  I like where I live, it is comfortable.  I can touch it, hear it, see  it -- my beating heart,  exotic fish in the depths of the sea.  What I cannot see is not a challenge.
Ide:    But where does fish soup come from, or a fish scrawled on an ancient wall, graffiti left by folks for  whom the world was not flat?
Emp: Fish soup I know, folks who draw fish on walls I do not know.  I do know their descendants today  show little eagerness to plunge into the sea of their ancient belief.       
Ide:   We are a sorry lot.

Mathematics is all truth and no knowledge,
Magic is all knowledge and no truth;
Physics is narrow truth and bounded knowledge,
Literature is diffuse truth and a garden of knowledge;
Religion is received truth and ambivalent knowledge.   

Though many have, the little ones of God have not been decimated
by arrogant engagements of mind.
Grounded in love, they believe in order to understand;
for fear of idolatry, they do not understand in order to believe.
They also know what word saturated minds neglect:
that which exists in the mind is but an apparition of existence.

The real irony of existence is that ironies are commonplace.
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There are three orders of saints:
those who are a glory on the mountain tops;
those who gleam brightly on the sides of the hills; and those who are faint lights down in the valleys. –St. Patrick

 
Communism presumes man is as selfless as Christianity seeks to make him.

Nuclear fission of heavy elements, though at least as portentous for man as the Copernican revolution,
has no elegant explanation, nothing close to the simple and satisfying explanation Newton could provide for the wandering of the planets thru the heavens.  Having remained intact for billions of years inside and outside of distant stars, the sudden, violent splitting of the dark and remote core of the heaviest of atoms is rather like the fitful phenomena of lesser sciences, meteorology or seismology for example.  In spite of
the heroics of sophisticated analysis, the explanation of nuclear fission remains incomplete.

We are uncomfortable sojourners in a blind world of quarks and electrons.
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It has been said that there is enough depleted uranium sitting out in the weather at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to electrify the world for 500 years.  There is no other proven long-term option.

15Sept ID: Ex07, Hu02, Sc09, RCP11 (reprise 03April2011) -------------------
What accumulated resource of knowing, what rite of perception urges the belief that time and
space are required for me to be?   Why so tightly held by many, this faith embedded in
grammar alone?

Praise the work of an artist and he will tell you all about it; praise the performance of a  musician
and he will tell you how it fell short.

Physical science has always denied any transcendence associated with physical entities.
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The neutron fission chain originates in the remote and unimaginable domain of the atomic nucleus.
It is brought to life simply by piling up uranium.  I have never gotten over this childlike arrangement of God’s creation. 
We are all our brothers'  keeper, molders of their destiny, whether we try to help them, touch them, or simply listen, or turn away in fear and careless neglect.   How frightening, Lord!
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    Eternal Father, reaching from end to end of the universe, and ordering all things with your mighty arm: for you, time is the unfolding of truth that already is, the unveiling of beauty that is yet to be.  Your Son has saved us in history by overcoming death, so that transcending time he might free us from death.

   
If contemporary Christianity does not end its toleration of ambiguity regarding the veracity of New Testament narratives, it will continue to diffuse into the surrounding cultural mosaic.  Even now the Incarnation, core of Christian belief, is too little proclaimed as the one totally stunning event of creation.  Christmas carols, a homely example and early victim of contemporary Gnosticism, have become folk songs indifferent to the truths they enshrine.  How many Christians sink into the mood of Christmas with "I Saw Three Ships" and "What Child Is This" and do not know the difference?       Their forebears did!

Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
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The splendor of the Virgin Birth is spread like flashes of lightning throughout the world.
St. Peter Chrysologus

 
Rejoice
We are fearfully and wonderfully made, a singular reality,
Wrapped in skin and silks, destined for eternity.           

Will some hero-saint come soon in the new millennium, open our tired eyes and lead us back to         Christmas?  With tome or poem, will he peal away the cataract of presumptuous human analytics so the carols we sing will overwhelm us  again with their confident and stunning convolution of the fancy and the reality of the Nativity?
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The faith of Christians sees through a grim molecular world without meaning or hope and,
sings to the Lord a new song,
   tells his glory among the nations,
and among all peoples recites his wondrous deeds.

   
Welcome shapes now and then invade my discontent,
Curious consolations beyond words,
Baffling embraces in moments of music, of drama.
Are they a seasoned froth from elsewhere,
    These inebriations that confront my restlessness?

We live in a culture committed to the tunnel vision of scientism and the attendant hopelessness of existentialism.  Both are challenged by Christian living centered on the courageous belief in a transcendent and caring God who acts in inscrutable ways to further his mercy-laden desire to bring salvation to all of human kind.
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If you do not believe in a living God, the question: What is the purpose of life?  is unaskable and unanswerable.  To whom or to what would you address the question? J.R.R. Tolkien

   
Entanglements
While God is the focus of all I believe,
Molecular structures are all I see.

Looming images of God,
Dim, remote, fearful,
Towering in a desolate desert, 
A perilous gamble to know:
Few surrender, many suffer –Dreadful!

For quite some time, my deepest awareness has been that I am a pilgrim in an alien land.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Tavern Talk
Emp: I feel good, connected, one with the world, the universe.  I’m at home.
Ide:   But your world is flat, your contentment is blind to the deep of existence.
Emp: Whatever.  I like where I live, it is comfortable.  I can touch it, hear it, see  it -- my beating heart,
exotic fish in the depths of the sea.  What I cannot see is not a challenge.
Ide:    But where does fish soup come from, or a fish scrawled on an ancient wall, graffiti left by folks for
whom the world was not flat?
Emp: Fish soup I know, folks who draw fish on walls I do not know.  I do know their descendants today
show little eagerness to plunge into the sea of their ancient belief.       
Ide:   We are a sorry lot.

Enlightened theologians veil the divinity of Christ in ambiguity by telling us his divinity shines upon us as an inner sun which early Christianity discovered well after he died.  Such a remote construction of the divinity of Christ unsettles ordinary Christians who are less intellectually agile.  They are not so easily enlightened!  In past centuries, intellectual stiffness of the faithful has saved Christianity from ruin.

Taken to be decisive but did they find too much?  The contemporary explanation of the origin of biological structures is a twisted, ladder-like mechanical template ironically discovered at the very time physics, the icon of mechanistic theories of nature, was well  into a crisis of intelligibility.  While concepts of the material world were fading  deeper into abstraction and patterns of symmetry, the secret of life was suddenly revealed as a tinker toy molecular arrangement as buoyantly naive as Newtonian mechanics, and conspicuously like it.
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Another peculiarity of  nuclear fission, in addition to prompt neutrons emitted immediately, is the  small fraction of delayed neutrons that appear a fraction of a second after the fission event.  This is eons compared to the time scale of the fission event itself.  The violent release of nuclear fission energy is made possible by the prompt neutrons.  The curiosity of delayed neutrons makes possible a more  manageable release of nuclear energy.  Some of us are inclined to think this is providential.  In due time, nuclear energy may be all we have to support an advanced civilization.

   
Senseless, the deep dilemma of atoms,
   Unknowable clouds, whims of existence,
   Spinning shards of condensed light,
   Tripping stones for understanding:
They behave but they are not.       --Aliens!    

Dying to self is not fatal.
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Nuclear fission is the splitting of a wobbly overweight atomic nucleus like uranium into two unequal  pieces.  It can happen spontaneously or as a result of a collision with a neutron.    The fission event, essentially instantaneous,  is accompanied by a large release of energy and a small number of fast-neutrons.  The physical details of nuclear fission are singularly curious and not fully understood.

Psalm-like Prayer
Perplexing are the words of men, vexing is the hum of their bewildering phrases.  Why do you remain quiet, Lord, like a gentle wind?   Rend the stillness that we may hear you, bestow comfort with healing words.
 
Science, the drama of knowing about stuff and things, became so productive, so startling, that mind lost itself in the excitement.  And why not?  It’s simple method of inquiry yields deep and orderly insights beyond the clutter of culture, each the reward of craft and patience.  Indeed, it is like the games of children: hide and seek, tag, blindman’s buff, leapfrog. . .
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Until the turn of the 20th century, space and time for the triumphant enterprise of physics were presumed to be just what they appear to be: a fixed arena in which physical events take place.  There was no cause to question the plain evidence of experience that physical events do not influence the space or the time they occupy.  A stage is not affected by the players acting upon it.

The Second Big Bang
Beasts on planet earth, aliens in a cluttered
      landscape,
Restless itinerants, nurtured in wetlands and tangled forests
All arms and legs, sentient, speechless wanderers.

In a breathless moment, God cleaves creation,
The awkward ape awakens, awareness and knowing appear
Perilous freedom is loosed on an unprepared earth,
Joy and suffering become our story, and God’s passion.
All Glory, All.
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The times are never so bad but that a good man can live in them. Thomas More

07Apr ID: Ex13, Re04, RCP11 (reprise 28Nov2010)------------------------     
Senseless, the deep dilemma of atoms,
   Unknowable clouds, whims of existence,
   Spinning shards of condensed light,
   Tripping stones for understanding:
They behave but they are not.       --Aliens!    

Dying to self is not fatal.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Nuclear fission is the splitting of a wobbly overweight atomic nucleus like uranium into two unequal  pieces.  It can happen spontaneously or as a result of a collision with a neutron.    The fission event, essentially instantaneous,  is accompanied by a large release of energy and a small number of fast-neutrons.  The physical details of nuclear fission are singularly curious and not fully understood.

The puzzling circus of existence, the brute facts of it, would disquiet the wonder of any child of earth,
exhausted in the huge mansion of explanations from the cryptic sketches in Genesis to the attractive narrations of the Navaho-- now relegated to books for children--from the fanciful constructs of physics to the unsightly patchwork of evolution, which in our day has a secure grip on human perception and discourse.
Discernment
Bridges of packed words stretch across gaping rifts of dismissed ignorance.
   Flamboyant plumage cloaks vexing questions, hides rich depths of awareness.
      Unruly quests, the conceit of cagey fools, shrink webbed beauty.
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My hands-on astonishment with nuclear energy began without drama in my  job out of college: piling  bricks of natural uranium on early crew in Pajarito Canyon in Los Alamos, New Mexico.  Those bricks weighed half-again as much as lead. 

When a scientist reaches the end of his analysis, he should not be sure he has reached the essence of the matter under study until he reckons the extent to which his conclusions reflect no more than the habitat of his own thinking and that of his professional colleagues. (Cf. De Chardin, Phenomenon Of Man)

Recall the year 1981 when the authenticity of an ancient relic was upheld, when the cold calculating eye of science saw the imprint of the wounded body of Christ on the venerable Shroud of Turin.
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A passenger on a train, walking in the direction of the train, will move a distance equal to the distance he moves on the train plus the distance the train moves on the tracks.  His velocity relative to the earth is the velocity of his walking plus the velocity of the train.  How could it be otherwise?  The train, the passenger and the earth are all in the same ship of existence.  Only fringe philosophers looking for attention, or worse, nitpicking by purist mathematicians would doubt these common sense perceptions.
The above sensible conclusion however is mistaken. The truth with the benign label relativity is radically different.  The fallout in the our view of reality has been huge and not least in the realm of religion.

Humor is the flower of wisdom.

That genetic variability is exclusively random is gratuitous and unprovable, a reminder of the hidden variable issue that bedevils quantum mechanics.   As in physics, the exclusion of design in favor of mathematics alone is axiomatic rather than derived.
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Nuclear fission and the neutron fission chain are frightfully interesting, a unique phenomenon of nature astonishing beyond words, a prodigious source of energy and an agitated dilemma for society.

When a scientist reaches the end of his analysis, he should not be sure he has reached the essence of the matter under study until he reckons the extent to which his conclusions reflect no more than the habitat of his own thinking and that of his professional colleagues.
(Cf. De Chardin, Phenomenon Of Man)

Recall the year 1981 when the authenticity of an ancient relic was upheld, when the cold calculating eye of science saw the imprint of the wounded body of Christ on the venerable Shroud of Turin.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A passenger on a train, walking in the direction of the train, will move a distance equal to the distance he moves on the train plus the distance the train moves on the tracks.  His velocity relative to the earth is the velocity of his walking plus the velocity of the train.  How could it be otherwise?  The train, the passenger and the earth are all in the same ship of existence.  Only fringe philosophers looking for attention, or worse, nitpicking by purist mathematicians would doubt these common sense perceptions.
The above sensible conclusion however is mistaken. The truth with the benign label relativity is radically different.  The fallout in the our view of reality has been huge and not least in the realm of religion.

The tale of Don Quixote is of incredible simplicity all the while filled to the brim with wily discourse on the human condition.  Impetuous and disconnected like any worthy rascal, this narrative of many dimensions reverberates with the highs and lows of human foibles and ideals all the while smiling at its own profundity.  Inevitably, the reader is drawn to the riddle of the author’s purpose.

What have influential theologians been doing while the revolutionary discoveries in science excite the world?  With unseemly attachment to the hubris of our age, many rework core beliefs and perspectives of Christianity to harmonize with contemporary  rationalism born of mechanistic physics.
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Curious about relativity?  Then, let it be said, relativity, special or otherwise, is more curious than your curiosity could ever imagine. 

TIME - III
Ages of experience suggests we are not alone; clues abound that the springs of meaning and purpose
are more than froth in the trough of time.  The consensus of this heritage is not universal, of course, for such is the rashness of human freedom. 

Scientific establishment unbelief is a crude cultural burden that should move us to know what inspires all but a few of  these clever explorers of the sensible world to proclaim so loudly that all of reality is revealed in the thin slice of observation they revel in.   Are they driven by a natural devotion to their faith statements, quite like those of us who are believers?
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From the time of Isaac Newton late in the 17th century, the common sense perception of space and time served the needs of physics at all levels of accuracy.  It was the last thing  physicists would want to question in their triumphant quantitative description of the dazzling collage of physical existence.  Why speculate in absurdities, e.g. lengths  might appear to be different or clocks beat to a different click when they are moving?  This was the period of classical physics.  The arrival of modern physics at the turn of the 20th century was swift, radical, and unwelcome.  The common sense notion of space and time was suddenly replaced by the impenetrable notion of space-time.  One wonders if common sense has ever quite recovered